Mozilla Discussion Forums are available via three access methods – mailing lists, newsgroups and Google Groups. For several months now we have had a problem with changes to the configuration being propagated to the Google Groups side. I am pleased to announce that this problem is now completely or mostly fixed. The following recently-created groups now have matching Google Groups:
- mozilla.community.belgium
- mozilla.community.bulgaria
- mozilla.community.mojo
- mozilla.community.tunisia
- mozilla.dev.mdn
- mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine.internals
- mozilla.dev.tree-management.tracemonkey
- mozilla.join
- mozilla.reps.general
- mozilla.reps.webdev
- mozilla.tools.socorro
There are a couple which don’t yet, which we are working on:
- mozilla.community.arab-world
- mozilla.dev.identity
We are enquiring with Google as to whether we can get old messages synced across. But all new messages should be archived there.
This also means we should be able to press forward with the new configuration plan and deal with spam. Yay! To that end, the following test groups will be changing to “moderated” on Friday evening PST:
- mozilla.community.uk
- mozilla.governance
- mozilla.jobs
- mozilla.legal
- mozilla.support.other
(This is bug 638209).
Do you have a planning for what will follow this first batch ?
I’m impatiently waiting for the group I usually use to be converted.
God we’ve been waiting. Thanks to Beltzner for rocking this all a bit and making one more good thing for Firefox before leaving.
What about false positives? Will they go immediately to the spamfighter robot’s wastebasket or will they get a second chance?
In my experience it is not realistic to expect any automated spam fighting system to *both* always pass legitimate mail *and* always block spam (I’m talking about the spam filter which IIUC will scan every mail before it goes either to a moderator or, if the “From” sender is already whitelisted, straight to the list). My take on it is that passed spam and delayed legit mail should both be kept as low as possible (I don’t hope ever to bring them down to zero) but lost legit mail is unacceptable, so for my own mail I insist on having mail that is “detected as spam” being held in a separate location and not destroyed unseen (Thunderbird and SeaMonkey treat “Junk” this way, some email providers also have a separate “spam” or “held mail” folder accessible by webmail or maybe IMAP, in addition to the usual Inbox). Yes, it may seem like a chore to review all that trash before it gets destroyed (usually one look at the Subjects is enough); but then, in my case maybe once in a thousand, there is one mail which was blocked by the spam filter and should have been let through.
jmdesp: Beltzner is indeed amazing, but you need to credit getting this working to Dave Miller. :-)
Tony: Still working out the exact details.